But anyone who lives in or around the San Francisco Bay Area is no doubt aware that these days, zeppelin travel is alive and well. That's thanks to Airship Ventures, a company run out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which operates one of the world's three airships, all of which were build by Zeppelin NT, a company located in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Today, during an event hosted by the cloud storage company SugarSync, I got a chance to ride aboard the Airship Eureka, and fly 1,000 feet above some of the most picturesque parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. During the hour-long ride, we coasted above the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge -- which will be the world's largest self-anchoring suspension bridge when it's completed next year -- as well as Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and of course, San Francisco itself.

Zeppelins may not be the behemoths they once were -- the Hindenburg was longer than the U.S. Capitol -- but they are still huge. The Eureka is longer than a 747, making it the world's largest passenger aircraft, according to Airship Ventures. But unlike an airplane that flies more than 500 miles an hour at 38,000 feet, an airship travels at a leisurely pace less than a quarter mile above the ground, meaning that passengers -- each of whom get their own window seat -- have world-class views.